Maynard Amerine, 87, California Wine Expert

By MOLLY O'NEILL

Published: March 13, 1998

Correction Appended

Maynard A. Amerine, the elegant and erudite plant physiologist whose pioneering research helped revive the California wine industry after the repeal of Prohibition, died on Wednesday at his home in St. Helena, Calif. He was 87 and was widely acclaimed as the father of American wine.

He died after a three-year battle with Alzheimer's disease, said his physician and friend, Dr. Rudy Schmidt, the former dean of the school of medicine of the University of California at San Francisco.

Dr. Amerine was the first researcher hired by the newly formed Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California at Davis in 1935. He completed his doctorate while studying the effect of climate on grapes in the fledgling program, became a full professor in 1952 and was the department chairman from 1957 to 1962.

In a career spanning 60 years, he published 16 books, more than 400 scientific papers and dozens of articles in popular magazines. His work on the role of climate in grape growing, enology, plant biology and sensory perception is a classic among vintners throughout the world.

After the vines that were left untended during Prohibition had been nursed and coaxed into world-class status, Dr. Amerine began advising foreign governments with dreams of developing wine industries. Viticulture in Algeria, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, Russia and South Africa benefited from his advice.

''If you did what he told you,'' said Robert Mondavi, the chairman of the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville, Calif., ''you couldn't help but make outstanding wine. He was my mentor, and I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for him.''

Although Dr. Amerine retired from the university more than 25 years ago, Mr. Mondavi said that his shoes had not been filled. He added that no one had appeared with the same degree of scientific genius, creativity and the ability to communicate with academics, grape growers, wine makers and governments.

Diminutive, dapper and elegantly spoken, Dr. Amerine possessed a rare combination of scientific gift and social graces. Born in 1911, he was the elder child of Roy Reagan Amerine and Tennessee Davis Amerine. His younger sister, Velma Ethel Winn, died in 1993.

Growing up on his family's fruit farm in Modesto, Calif., Dr. Amerine was, according to childhood friends, a serious boy who played the French horn, studied art history and was obsessed with his chemistry set.

Sheer serendipity allowed him to bring both his artistic and scientific leanings to bear on the study of wine.

Grape science was not exactly glamorous, he told a reporter in 1994, saying, ''Nobody, after all, was handing out Nobel prizes in viticulture or enology.'' Nevertheless, Prohibition had just been repealed, and the California wine industry was aching for scientific studies to direct its effort to resurrect the vineyards.

Through measuring the effect of climate on different varieties of grapes, Dr. Amerine and Dr. Albert J. Winkler introduced the now famous ''region system'' of grape growing in 1944. The grafting and replanting that the two researchers recommended eventually helped California move beyond jug wines to become one of the world's premier wine-producing areas.

''I still wouldn't plant anything without consulting that paper,'' said Mr. Mondavi, adding that he re-read Dr. Amerine's 1980 treatise, ''The Technology of Wine Making,'' at least once a year.

While continuing his research into the relationship between climate and grapes, Dr. Amerine also began to study sensory perception. The book that he wrote with a mathematician, Edward B. Roessler, ''Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation,'' (W. H. Freeman & Company, 1976) remains the Baedeker of human taste.

Beneath his clipped cadence and frightening fluency in technical language, Dr. Amerine was down-to-earth and had poetic leanings.

''He could be a bit prim, stiff like an Englishman,'' said Kerry Damskey, wine maker for the Associated Vintage Group at Hopland in a 1994 interview for the magazine, Napa Valley Appellation. ''But then he'd tell you that the best way to determine when to pick gewurztraminer grapes is to camp next to the vines in the vineyard and breathe the air.''

Dr. Amerine compared taste to painting and music, but if his judgment and appraisals were the gold standard of the wine industry, his tastes were simple. He drank California zinfandel, not fine Bordeaux.

''The first day I went to work for him he told me that he had a hobby of collecting famous people,'' said Dr. Cornelius Ough, a professor emeritus at Davis. ''Success and fame fascinated him.''

A longtime member of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, Dr. Amerine collected chief executive officers and artists with equal enthusiasm. ''Anybody who had a name,'' Dr. Ough said.

Dr. Amerine was a marvelous cook and entertained with a flamboyance that was at odds with an otherwise understated persona. He took pride in putting people together. M. F. K. Fisher and James Beard met at his table, where he routinely entertained his students as well as legendary musicians, actors and heads of state.

But when he was not acting as chef and host in his Sonoma County home, Dr. Amerine was by nature reserved, a loner and an avid traveler who never married. He leaves no immediate survivors.

Photo: Maynard A. Amerine (University of California at Davis)

Correction: March 25, 1998, Wednesday An obituary on March 13 about Maynard A. Amerine, a plant physiologist who helped revive the California wine industry after Prohibition, misidentified the location of his home town, St. Helena, Calif. It is in Napa County, not Sonoma.